A few yards farther along, a pile of fabric showed pale against the baseboards. Arabella lifted it with two fingers, holding it in front of her like three-day-old fish. One wise man’s robe.

She opened her fingers, letting the fabric slither to the floor at her feet. Her assailant must have yanked it off while she was still trying to untangle her legs from her blasted skirt and then strolled blithely back into the throng of spectators in the dining hall.

There was no way of determining whose robe it was; she had hemmed dozens of the blasted things, making some over from last year’s, sewing others from scratch. The school was positively littered with the garments. Anyone could have taken one. She couldn’t even identify her attacker by voice. Whoever it was had taken care to wrap cloth around his face, muffling his voice. The only thing she was fairly sure of was that her attacker had been male.

Arabella paused in the foyer, beneath the battered piece of mistletoe she had passed what felt like a lifetime ago and looked across the entry-way into the dining hall. Miss Climpson’s students appeared to possess an inordinately large number of brothers, fathers, uncles, and male cousins.

Among them, she spotted Signor Marconi, who appeared to be even more than usually rumpled. He was in possession of both of his mustachios this time, but his hair was tousled and his cravat askew.

Arabella’s eyes narrowed on the music master. For all the absurdity of the fake mustaches, he was younger than he tried to appear, not more than a few years older than she was, at a guess. He had participated in all the rehearsals, so he knew about the wise men’s robes and the paper scimitars.

There had been no attacks on her room or her person until she had interrupted Signor Marconi in his midnight wanderings around the school.

As she stared at the music master, something else clicked into place. The music room. The attack had taken place in the music room. It wasn’t exactly conclusive evidence, but it certainly militated in that direction. Either the music master thought she had seen something he wanted hidden or he was simply holding a grudge for the fact that she had caused the loss of his favorite set of mustachios.

What a tempest in a teapot it had all turned out to be.

When she told Turnip —

Arabella came up short, feeling a bit as though she had run flat into a wall without seeing it coming. She wasn’t going to tell Turnip Fitzhugh about this or about anything.

It was a surprisingly lonely feeling.

She would find Jane. She would find Jane, and eat some disgusting mince pie, and plot the revenge she planned to take on Signor Marconi. Perhaps she might even confront Signor Marconi and make him squirm a bit. Arabella flexed her wrists. There were red marks in her skin that would undoubtedly darken to a lovely purple-yellow by morning. Or she could make him squirm a lot.

Rubbing her sore wrists, Arabella set off into the dining hall in search of Jane. Being so diminutive, Jane was always a bother to spot in a crowd, although less so here than usual, with all the short schoolgirls lowering the general height ratio. Arabella finally located her standing near the refreshment table.

Jane was talking to a tall man, a tall man with hair as gold as a wise man’s gift and a coat made of crimson cloth that would have looked absurd on anyone else. Arabella stared at them and wished herself back in that corridor with a paper scimitar against her throat. Or in her bed with the covers pulled up over her head.

As she stood there, he looked up. His eyes briefly met hers.

And he looked away.

He looked away as though he had never seen her before and never cared to again. He turned and said something to Jane. Arabella couldn’t hear what it was, but it had to be a farewell of some sort, because he was bowing, and moving away, with a celerity that would have been unflattering under any circumstances and was even more so now, because she knew she had brought it on herself.

Arabella wove her way through the crowd of parents and friends to Jane. By the time she reached her, there was no sign of a broad-shouldered blond man with poor taste in cravats.

“Was that Mr. Fitzhugh with you?” asked Arabella without preamble.

“Were you looking for him?” asked Jane innocently.

“No,” Arabella snapped.

Jane raised an eyebrow.

“What I mean is” — Arabella tried not to follow him through the crowd with her eyes — “I was looking for you.”

“How flattering,” said Jane, and Arabella let herself hope that would be the end of it, until, “I like your Mr. Fitzhugh.”

“Good. You can have him.”

“Arabella?”

Arabella pressed her hands to her face. “I am sorry. It has been an exceedingly long evening.”

She had meant to tell Jane about Signor Marconi and the attack of the anonymous wise man, but now that she was here, she didn’t know how to begin. It all sounded absurd. The only one sure to believe her was Turnip.

The same Turnip whom she had just told to go away and never come back.

Arabella looked up to find Jane looking at her speculatively. “You are still going to Girdings House for Christmas, aren’t you?”

“Yes, with my Aunt Osborne.” At one point, the thought of spending Christmas with Aunt Osborne and her new husband had filled her with trepidation. Now Arabella found it hard to work up the necessary sense of dread. Being held at scimitar-point could do that to one. “Why?”

“No reason.” Jane examined a plate of miniature mince pies. “No reason at all.”

Chapter 19

The Dowager Duchess of Dovedale had instructed her guests to arrive at Girdings House by noon on the day before Christmas, but not even the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale could control every axle on every wheel on every carriage in the kingdom.

It was full dark by the time Arabella arrived. After seven long days on the road, Arabella felt nothing but numb, from the blue tips of her toes straight through the mud that had somehow got in her hair. Her emotions were as frozen as her fingers.

The events at Miss Climpson’s seminary already seemed a world away. The idea that she might have kissed Turnip Fitzhugh or chased with him after a pudding through the grounds of Farley Castle was, quite frankly, ludicrous. She was back to her old life again, back to being that quiet Miss Dempsey who was invited to fill out a table, then shuffled off to the side of the room as quickly as possible.

There was no one from the ducal family to greet Arabella and her maid when they arrived at Girdings House. Arabella hadn’t expected there would be. Poor relations seldom got the full ducal treatment. They were informed that the rest of the party were already out in the grounds, collecting holly and ivy with which to deck the halls. A footman, resplendent in the Dovedale livery of green and gold, showed them up a grand staircase decorated with battle scenes portraying the triumphs of long-dead Dovedales, then up a less grand staircase, and finally down a long hallway that grew considerably less imposing as it went on.

He opened the door into a room that Arabella would have considered luxurious by everyday standards, but which was undoubtedly Spartan on the ducal scale of things. Her room had been allotted to her with a delicate understanding of her place in the great chain of being. No room in Girdings could possibly be called mean, but hers was off to the side, with a view of the kitchen garden and some rather workman-like outbuildings. There was water waiting and a fire in the grate, and that was all Arabella cared about.

“A fine pickle this is,” snapped Rose, vigorously beating mud out of Arabella’s pelisse as the door closed behind the footman.

“A pickle or a gherkin?” Arabella stripped her gloves off her frozen fingers and wandered to the one window to inspect the view.

Rose bristled, obviously suspecting Arabella of having fun at her expense. “Six of one, half a dozen of the other,” she said repressively, “and no question about it. I should have known that coachman was no good. Here. This is as good as I can make it without a proper cleaning.”

“Thank you,” said Arabella meekly, and let the maid help her back into her pelisse.

Rose wrung out a cloth, applying it vigorously to Arabella’s face, much the same way she had when Arabella was twelve and had underestimated the adhesive properties of raspberry jam. Rose had been with Aunt Osborne for a very long time. She had never quite made up her mind as to whether she approved of Arabella. Family was family, but poor relations something slightly less.

That, thought Arabella, was something she missed about Miss Climpson’s. It had been rather nice to have a place in the world that she had earned for herself, rather than being allotted it on perpetual sufferance.

She had thought it didn’t make a difference, but it did.

Rose narrowed her eyes at her, squinting at Arabella’s head with a critical air. “That’s the worst of the travel dust gone from your face, but there’s no telling what they’ll make of your hair.” She shrugged with the air of one abandoning a bad job. “Well, it’s dark and you’ll have your bonnet on and that’s the best one can hope for.”

“Thank you, Rose.”

Nothing like a few compliments to start one’s evening off well.

Despite the size of the grounds, Arabella had no difficulty finding the West Wood. More of the ubiquitous footmen, identical in their white wigs and pseudo-feudal livery, had directed her to the gardens, where flaming lines of torches had been set to guide the houseguests through the carefully clipped parterres of the formal gardens through to the artfully designed wilderness beyond.